The scout Mindset - Julia Galef

 

Part I The Case for Scout Mindset

Chapter 1: Two types of thinking

• Explore ideas and follow the evidence wherever it leads, unconstrained by what you're "supposed to" think.
• We talk about our beliefs as if they're military positions, or even fortresses, built to resist attack.
• "Motivated reasoning" or soldier mindset.
• Accuracy motivated reasoning is like being a scout forming a map of the strategic landscape.
• Always open to changing your mind in response to new information.
• Scout mindset is what prompts us to question our assumptions and stress-test our plans.

Chapter 2: What the Soldier Is Protecting

• Poorer people are more likely to believe that luck plays a big role in life, while wealthier people tend to credit hard work and talent alone.
• How I want other people to see me?
• Just as there are fashions in clothing, so, too, are there fashions in ideas.
• People who identifies strongly as Catholics (i.e., they endorse statements like "I feel solidarity with Catholic people") are more skeptical when a Catholic priest is accused of sexual abuse.
• We use motivated reasoning not because we don't know any better, but because we're trying to protect things that are vitally important to us - our ability to feel good about our lives and ourselves, our motivation to try hard things and stick with them, our ability to look good and persuade, and our acceptance in our communities.
• Rather than pursuing social acceptance by suppressing your disagreements with your community, you could instead decide to leave and find a different community you fit in better.

Chapter 3: Why Truth Is More Valuable Than We realize

• We trade off between judgment and belonging.
• We trade off between judgment and persuasion.
• We trade off between judgment and morale.
• We make these trade-offs, and many more, all the time, usually without even realizing we're doing so.
• The source of this self-sabotage is present-bias, a feature of our intuitive decision-making in which we care too much about short-term consequences and too little about long-term consequences. In other words, we're impatient, and we get more impatient as the potential rewards grow closer.
• Incrementally improve my thinking habits.
• We overestimate the importance of how we come across to other people.
• The prospect of rejection is so stressful that we often come up with rationalizations to justify not doing it.
• Our world is becoming one that rewards the ability to see clearly, especially in the long run.

Part II - Developing Self-Awareness

Chapter 4: Signs of a Scout

• Feeling objective doesn't make you a scout.
• Being smart and knowledgeable doesn't make you a scout.
• The people with the highest levels of scientific intelligence were also the most politically polarized in their opinions.
• Intelligence and knowledge are just tools.
• But there's nothing inherent to the tools that makes you a scout.
• Actually practicing scout mindset makes you a scout.
• Do you tell other people when you realize they were right?
• How do you react to personal criticism?
• Motivated reasoning is our natural state.

Chapter 5: Noticing Bias

• Would you evaluate that advice differently if your friend had offered it instead of your spouse?
• Am I judging other people's behavior by a standard I wouldn't apply to myself?
• You're judging yourself more harshly than you would judge someone else in exactly the same situation.
• The Outsider Test.
• Imagine someone else stepped into your shoes - what do you expect they would do in your situation?
• I do a conformity test: Imagine this person told me that they no longer held this view. Would I still hold it? Would I feel comfortable defending it to them?
• I needed to be a little less credulous of evidence that happened to support my side.
• A leading theory for why we're biased in favor of the status quo is that we're loss averse: the pain we feel from a loss outweighs the pleasure we feel from a similar-size gain.
• We fixate more on what we'll be losing than we'll be gaining.
• Your initial judgments are a starting point for an exploration, not an end point.

Chapter 6: How Sure are You?

• Certainty is simple. Certainty is comfortable. Certainty makes us feel smart and competent.
• Think in shades of gray instead of black and white.
• Plus j'ai des doutes, plus c'est vrai.
• Plus je suis sûr et moins c'est vrai.
• A bet can reveal how sure you really are.
• A bet is any decision in which you stand to gain or lose something of value, based on the outcome.
• Quantifying your uncertainty, getting calibrated, and coming up with hypothetical bets are valuable skills in their own right. But having the self-awareness to be able to tell wether you're describing reality honestly, to the best of your abilities, is even more valuable still.

Part III - Thriving Without illusions

Chapter 7: Coping with Reality

• I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this.
• Count your blessings.
• Notice how far you've come.
• Remember you can't do more than your best.
• Make a plan.
• Notice silver linings (le bon côté de la chose)
• Focus on a different goal.
• Things could be worse.

Chapter 8: Motivation Without Self-Deception

• Is this goal desirable enough to be worth the risk?
• Are there any other goals that would be similarly desirable but require less risk?
• Most people have more than one thing they enjoy and are good at, or could at least become good at.
• Is this goal worth pursuing, compared to other things I could do instead?
• An accurate picture of the odds helps you adapt your plan over time.
• Over time, your situation will change, or you'll learn new information, and you'll need to revise your estimate of the odds.
• Bets worth taking.
• But you'll have the opportunity to make many different bets over the course of your life

• We're loss averse, meaning that the pain of a loss is greater than the pleasure of a similarly sized gain.
• There's always some element of chance involved.
• Accepting the possibility of failure in advance is liberating.
• I just accepted that probably I would lose everything.
• When they get up in the morning, they're motivated by more concrete things.

Chapter 9: Influence without Overconfidence

• Don't invest unless you can afford to lose it.
• It was a practice he had started when he was young, after noticing that people were more likely to reject his arguments when he used firm language like certainly and undoubtedly.
• He started noticing how much more receptive people were to his opinions when he expressed them gently.
• Show that uncertainty is justified.
• If you go back and look at the companies created by the PC revolution, in 1980, you probably wouldn't have predicted the five biggest winners.
• Give informed estimates.
• Showing that you're well informed and well prepared on a given topic doesn't require you to overstate how much certainty is possible on that topic.
• Have a plan.
• It's a speech that communicates vision. Conviction. Passion.
• You don't need to hold your opinions with 100% certainty.
• Expressing uncertainty isn't necessarily a bad thing.
• You can be inspiring without overpromising.

Part IV - Changing Your mind

Chapter 10: How to Be Wrong

• Change your mind a little at a time.
• Recognizing you were wrong makes you better at being right.
• When an investor recognizes he was wrong, it helps him make better investments.
• Confirmation bias.
• Recency bias.
• But if you at least start to think in terms of "updating" instead of "admitting you were wrong".
• If you're not changing your mind, you're doing something wrong.
• Discovering you were wrong is an update, not a failure.

Chapter 11: Lean In to Confusion

• Resist the urge to dismiss details that don't fit your theories, and instead, allow yourself to be confused and intrigued by them, to see them as puzzles to be solved.
• It is when we hear or see something that doesn't make sense - something 'crazy' - that a crucial fork in the road is presented.
• Acknowledge anomalies, even if you don't yet know how to explain them.
• Amway and Herbalife: multilevel marketing company.
• Instead of dismissing observations that contradict your theories, get curious about them.
• Isaac Asimov: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny..."

Chapter 12: Escape Your Echo Chamber

• Knowing that you have intellectual common ground with someone makes you more receptive to their arguments right off the bat.
• Even correct ideas often sound wrong when you first hear them.
• We all start out with wildly incorrect maps, and over time, as we get more information, we make them somewhat more accurate. Revising your map is a sign you're doing things right.

Part V - Rethinking Identity

Chapter 13: How Beliefs Become Identities

• The problem with identity is that it wrecks your ability to think clearly.

Chapter 14: Hold Your Identity Lightly

• Keep Your Identity Small.
• Truth prevail over partisanship or friendship.
• Personal reasons to mistrust doctors as well.
• Reading sources that confirm your beliefs, trusting people whom you're close to - everyone does that.
• Acknowledging the weaknesses in your "side" can go a long way toward showing someone from the other side that you're not just a zealot parroting dogma, and that you might be worth listening to.

Chapter 15: Scout Identity

• Our brains have a built-in bias for short-term rewards.
• Your communities shape your identity.
• We humans are social creatures, and your identities are shaped by our social circles, almost without noticing.
• Three Key Issues I've Changed My Mind About.
• You can choose what kind of people you attract.
• You can choose your community on line.
• You can choose your role models.
• Maybe what inspires you is the confidence of being comfortable with uncertainty.
• The idea of being intellectually honorable: wanting the truth to win out, and putting that principle above your own ego.
• My dear fell, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.

Conclusion

• We can take bold risks and persevere in the face of setbacks. We can influence, persuade and inspire. We can fight effectively for social change.
• The next time you're making a decision, ask yourself what kind of bias could be affecting your judgment in that situation, and then do the relevant thought experiment (e.g., outsider test, conformity test, status quo bias test)
• When you notice yourself making a claim with certainty ("There is no way..."), ask yourself how sure you really are.
• The next time a worry pops into your head and you're tempted to rationalize it away, instead make a concrete plan for how you would deal with it if it came true.
• Find an author, media outlet, or other opinion source who holds different views from you, but who has a better-than-average shot at changing your mind - someone you find reasonable or with whom you share some common ground.
• The next time you notice someone else being 'irrational", "crazy", or "rude", get curious about why their behavior might make sense to them.
• Look for opportunities to update at least a little bit.
• At the end of the day, we're a bunch of apes whose brains were optimized for defending ourselves and our tribes, not for doing unbiased evaluations of scientific evidence.